Men And Communication

How Men And Women Manipulate Each Other

"It's A Man's World" is a column on anything and everything related to the modern man, by Ian Lang. If there are any topics you'd like to see addressed here, send them to us at editorial@askmen.com or let us know what you think in the comments section.

Before I trekked home for Thanksgiving last week, I came across an article that was a lot like most articles I’ve read about male-female communication, only exponentially dumber. In a nutshell, the article said that when men tell women they’re “overreacting,” we’re being mean and psychologically damaging, and that we need to seriously stop.

The Gaslighting Phenomenon

The article centers around a phenomenon known as “gaslighting” — when you convince someone they’re crazy by convincing them that their reactions to something they’ve witnessed are extreme or outright unwarranted. The term comes from the 1944 film Gaslight, in which the antagonist (protagonist? brotagonist?) drives his wife crazy by setting the lights in his house to flicker and then telling her she’s seeing things. That’s a rad idea (FYI to my fiancee: I’m totally doing that when we get a place). In the article I read, one of the subtle and surely commonplace examples the author cited involved a man telling his significant other that she was fat and then telling her she was crazy when she reacted exactly the way you would expect anyone to react to that.

Does anyone see the problem there? From what I gather, in real-world terms, gaslighting is a way of manipulating someone by slowly convincing them that what they feel is wrong, thereby making them question and doubt everything about themselves. I don’t think I’m going to win any Nobel Prizes for saying that this isn’t a very healthy thing for any relationship, be it romantic or platonic or professional. But what I do think is important is the distinction between malicious, bonafide gaslighting (calling your wife fat and then telling her she’s acting crazy) and the subtle, harmless kind that happens every day for a reason: It allows men and women to communicate.

Are Men Going To Change For Women?

A lot of people have made a lot of money writing books trying to teach people how to communicate with the opposite sex. I don’t want to say that the bulk of it is directed at helping men “understand” women, but my guess would be that it is. Either way, we all know the rhetoric: Men use communication to convey information. Words mean what they mean, and talking for the sake of talking or expressing our feelings doesn’t come as naturally.

Women, alternatively, use communication as a bonding agent. Their words are more subtle while simultaneously carrying more weight. In short, it’s how they connect with people on several levels. Cue, then, the bad stand-up jokes about a wife being passive aggressive or saying one thing and meaning another, etc. The point is, men and women communicate differently, and even though we’re more cognizant of it, we’re not going to change that any time soon.